Employing multicast to deliver video applications in wireless networks (such as Mobile TV, electronic classroom, video conference, sports telecast, etc.) has received tremendous attention in recent years. There has been proposed a new rate-adaptation algorithm for multicasting multimedia content, efficient resource allocation algorithms for multicasting scalable video coding (SVC) streams and the multicast streaming problem with SVC-encoded videos has also been studied.
On one hand, wireless medium, due to its shared nature, provides natural support for multicast traffic and is efficient in utilizing wireless radio resources. On the other hand, a challenging issue for wireless multicast is that the transmission rate is limited by the user with the worst channel condition in the multicast group. Using beamforming technologies can potentially address the challenge because beamforming antennas can focus the energy along a particular direction, thereby increasing the minimum channel quality of a group of users.
Several recent works have considered exploiting beamforming antennas for wireless multicast transmissions. There has been studied the wireless multicast issue with beamforming antennas where the objective is to ensure full coverage and minimize the total transmission delay. In another work, there was considered the wireless multicast video transmission with beamforming antennas. Both of these works assume a different channel model in a typical indoor WiFi environment, where the designed single-lobe beam patterns, due to heavy reflection, penetration, and diffusion, overlap with each other. These works do not consider the more challenging problem of how to exploit non-overlapping beamforming antennas to enhance scalable video coded (SVC) encoded video delivery in multi-cast streaming systems.
Accordingly, there is a need for a method that exploits non-overlapping beamforming antennas to enhance video delivery in multicast streaming with SVC encoded videos.